[FRIAM] deducing underlying realities from emergent realities

[steve smith]

An interesting self-similar discussion to the topic of the discussion?

So we have deduced the generative structure of Sabine's argument to 
be/"just" a mish mash of semantic concepts arranged to fit her 
conservative narrative/?   We don't expect ( or need ) to /find a better 
structure/ to explain her behaviour?

Is her behaviour in some sense a part of an emergent, qualitatively 
distinct paradigm?

And is my offering here just a mish-mash of dense semantic concepts 
arranged to be disruptive or self-aggrandizing?

glen wrote:
> Yeah, it's kinda sad. Sabine suggests someone's trying to *deduce* the 
> generators from the phenomena? Is that a straw man? And is she making 
> some kind of postmodernist argument that hinges on the decoupling of 
> scales? E.g. since the generator can't be deduced [cough] from the 
> phenomena, nothing means anything anymore?
>
> What they're actually doing is induction, not deduction. And the end 
> products of the induction, the generative constraints, depend 
> fundamentally on the structure of the machine into which the data is 
> fed. That structure is generative, part of the forward map ... 
> deductive. But it's parameterized by the data. Even if we've plateaued 
> in parameterizing *this* structure, all it implies is that we'll find 
> a better structure. As Marcus and Jochen point out, it's really the 
> same thing we've been doing for decades, if not centuries, in many 
> disciplines.
>
> So her rhetoric here is much like her rhetoric claiming that "Science 
> if Failing". It's just a mish-mash of dense semantic concepts arranged 
> to fit her conservative narrative.

>
> On 11/17/24 08:45, Roger Critchlow wrote:
>> Sabine is wondering about reported failures of the new generations of 
>> LLM's to scale the way the their developers expected.
>>
>> https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/11/ai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html 
>> <https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/11/ai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html> 
>>
>>
>> On one slide she essentially draws the typical picture of an emergent 
>> level of organization arising from an underlying reality and asserts, 
>> as every physicist knows, that you cannot deduce the underlying 
>> reality from the emergent level.  Ergo, if you try to deduce physical 
>> reality from language, pictures, and videos you will inevitably hit a 
>> wall, because it can not be done.
>>
>> So she's actually grinding two axes at once: one is AI enthusiasts 
>> who expect LLM's to discover physics, and the other is AI enthusiasts 
>> who foresee no end to the improvement of LLM's as they throw more 
>> data and compute effort at them.
>>
>> But, of course, the usual failure of deduction runs in the opposite 
>> direction, you can't predict the emergent level from the rules of the 
>> underlying level.  Do LLM's believe in particle collliders?  Or do 
>> they think we hallucinated them?
>>
>
>
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